Think of him as the spymaster who came in from the cold. Well, it
wasn't actually so cold out there. After all, Robert Gates was on
innumerable corporate boards and the President of Texas A & M
University (which, not coincidentally, houses the library,
presidential papers, and museum of George H. W. Bush under whom he
served as director of the Central Intelligence Agency). But after two
dozen years in the CIA and on the National Security Council, after a
career which touched (or more than touched) on just about every great
foreign policy event in Washington's world from the final days of the
Vietnam War and the great Cold War struggle with the Soviet Union to
the Central American wars of Ronald Reagan, the Iran-Contra Affair, the
Afghan anti-Soviet war, and so much else, he was out of Washington and
in hibernation until James Baker's Iraq Study Group called him back.
Then, of course, he was picked by George W. Bush as the replacement for
the disastrous reign of error of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

Gates has, it seems, returned to Washington with a quiet vengeance
and evidently with all those skills acquired in his rough-and-tumble
years in the intelligence bureaucracy still intact. In practically no
time at all, he purged
the Defense Department of its leftover neocon civilians, and at every
crisis has inserted his own choices in positions of influence — as
secretary of the army, as Centcom commander, and most recently, in place of Rumsfeld's man, Marine General Peter Pace, as head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. (His emphasis has been on Navy men
to replace the discredited Army leadership of the Rumsfeld years.) It's
quite a record so far for a man who represented — until the neocons
boarded the ship of state — more than three decades of the imperial
Washington Consensus.

Now, at a moment that couldn't be more crucial, Gates and his
"inheritance" get their due, thanks to Roger Morris, a member of the
National Security Council Senior Staff under Presidents Johnson and
Nixon (he resigned in protest over the invasion of Cambodia) and
bestselling author of biographies of Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger,
and the Clintons. Over the next week Tomdispatch.com readers will get
not just a portrait of the real Robert Gates, but a full-scale, yet
miraculously concise, always surprising, history of American
"intelligence" (for which read: global covert action and covert
intervention). Morris, who previously offered a striking two-part
portrait of Donald Rumsfeld and the Defense Department at this site
(The Undertaker's Tally, parts 1 and 2),
now offers the Gates legacy, which is really the legacy of mainstream
Washington, the globe's imperial capital for this last
half-century-plus.

The Gates Inheritance will be posted in three parts this week and, long
as it is, it's actually a marvel of compression, packing into a
relatively modest space an epic history of mayhem none of us should
avoid — a grim history that led to September 11th, 2001 and now leads
us into an unknown, increasingly perilous future. Think of it as a
necessary reckoning with disaster — and consider this but a second
major installment in the rogue's gallery of Washington portraits Morris
will continue to produce periodically for this site. Now, plunge in. Tom

The Specialist - Robert Gates and the Tortured World of American Intelligence

by Roger Morris

"I may be dangerous," he said, "but I am not wicked. No, I am not wicked."

- Henry James, The American

It was a failed administration's ritual scapegoating, the ousting last winter of its ruinous secretary of defense. But in the sauve qui peut confirmation of his replacement"The only thing that mattered," said a Senate aide, "was that he was not Don Rumsfeld"there was inadvertent irony.

With George W. Bush's choice of ex-CIA Director Robert Gates to take
over the Pentagon, this most uninformed of presidents unwittingly gave
us back vital pages of our recent history. If Rumsfeld, Vice President
Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and the
neoconservative claque in the second echelon of the administration are
all complicit in today's misrule, Gates personifies older, equally
serious, if less recognized, less remembered abuses. His laden résumé
offers needed evidence that Washington's tortuous, torturing foreign
policies did not begin with the Bush regimeand will not end with it.

While Rumsfeld's record bared some of Washington's uglier realities and
revealed the depth of decay in the U.S. military, Gates' long passage
through the world of espionage and national security illuminates other
dark cornersspecters of the Cold War still haunting us, nether regions
of flawed, corrupted intelligence, and the malignant legacy of foreign
policy's evil twin, covert intervention.

Like the Senate, the media welcomed Gates, in the words of the Christian Science Monitor,
as the "Un-Rumsfeld." In the wake of his flinty predecessor, he arrived
as a smiling, silver-haired cherub of Midwestern earnestness. That
image seemed borne out by his swift firings of ranking Army officials
in the Walter Reed scandal, his apparent questioning of the value of
the Pentagon's notorious penal colony at Guantánamo, his more moderate
(or at least conventionally diplomatic) rhetoric in the international
arena, and even his heresy in mentioning respectfullyand quaintlythe
Constitutional role of "the press" in a Naval Academy commencement
address.

For all his relative virtues in 2007, however, Gates remains a genuine
Jekyll-and-Hyde character, a best-yet-worst of America as it flung its
vast power over the world. To appreciate who and what he wasand so who
and what he is likely to be now, at one of the most critical junctures
ever to face a secretary of defenseis to retrace much of the shrouded
side of American foreign policy and intelligence for the last
half-century or more. Most Americans hardly know that record, though
its reckonings are with us todaywith a vengeance. At the unexpected
climax of his long career, the 63 year-old Gates faces not only the
toll of the disastrous regime he joins, but of his own legacy as well.

This is a vintage American chronicle with dramatic settings and dark
secrets. The cast ranges from hearty boosters in Kansas to bitter
exiles on the Baltic, from doomed agents dropped behind Russian lines
across Eurasia to Islamic clerics car-bombed in the Middle Eastall in a
family saga of long-hidden paternity. As with Donald Rumsfeld, such a
sweeping historythe history, in this case, of that blind deity of
havoc, the CIAcannot come condensed or blog-sized. It is, necessarily,
without apology, a long trail a-winding. Though in the end this will
indeed be a profile of our new secretary of defense, much has to be
understood before Gates even joins the story in a serious way as
policy-accomplice and -maker. But the trip is full of color, and
quicker than it seems. And as usual, the essential lessons, along with
the devil, are in the details.

As with so many good stories, it begins on a traintwo trains, in fact,
crossing landscapes worlds apart, a great separation Robert Gates was
heir to, revealing much about the manand us.

"Heart of the Vortex"

One of the Santa Fe Railroad's old diamond-stacked, wood-burning
locomotives, chugging in off the Kansas prairie on what civic
historians memorialized as "a dark and stormy night" in May 1872, was
the making of Wichita. Finagled by boosters with government bonds and
railroad-company influence, beginning a flow of private profit from
public money and political favor that would be the hallmark of the town
(and nation), the new tracks thrust the settlement ahead of competing
sites as a lucrative depot for great cattle drives up the old Chisholm
Trail.

Wichita, 180 clacking miles southwest of the Kansas City stockyards,
would now become the "cow capital" of the plains. Even when barbed wire
turned the droves of cattle toward Dodge City in the 1880s, the train
saved the town, helping to transform it into a milling center for the
surrounding sea of wheat. Raucous saloons, brothels, and gambling dens
gave way to the white clapboard, civilized murmur and discreet
hypocrisies of merchants and farmers, churches and schools.

A sizable pool of oil was discovered nearby in 1915, and a year later
Wichita built its first airplane, just in time for the American entry
into the Great War. Over the 1920s, with amiable banks within reach and
a hungry workforce streaming out of the ragged farm economy,
ex-military pilots and barnstormers opened 29 aircraft factories in
what was now being touted as "the Air Capital of America." The
Depression killed some of those plants, but World War II and its Cold
War sequel begat the giantsBoeing and Beech, Cessna and Learjet,
feeding parasite payrolls like Raytheon's and those of Wichita
originals Pizza Hut and Coleman Camping.

By 1951, busy McConnell Air Force Base, its runways conveniently
verging on Boeing's, roared with the bounty of Cold War budgets. It was
already home to a Strategic Air Command wing and soon to an outlying
horseshoe of 18 Titan II missile sites. Ever abreast of the times,
Wichita neighborhoods of hale entrepreneurs and factory hands were now
home, as well, to clean-cut silo warriors whose understood, if
unspoken, round-the-clock business was preparing for the incineration
of the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and Communist China.

In 1960, Wichita was still a small city of 250,000a stubby skyline
along the silt-heavy Arkansas River. "Small-town atmosphere with
modern-city amenities… low crime rate, nationally-recognized school
system, low cost of living, ample opportunities for culture and
recreation"paradise according to the Chamber of Commerce. Kansas'
"largest little city" smugly sold itself as the ideal. America agreed.
In 1962, for the first of three times, quintessentially Midwestern,
quietly metaphorical Wichita was voted the "All-American City."

Just as typically, the model had dissidents. Behind booster smiles,
labor always met the anti-union snarl of the corporations and the city
they ruled. For the less than 10% of the community that was
African-American or Hispanic, unrelieved racism, face-to-face mockery,
went with Brown v. Board,
part and parcel of early desegregating Kansas. Not least, the place
bred its disillusioned intellectuals, known as the "Magic Locals," who,
in the course of the 1950s, fled for the Beat Scene of San Francisco's
North Beach, where they were celebrated as "the Wichita Group," in part
for the scorn they hurled at their abandoned archetypal town, and thus
the nation.

Their bane was the "vortex," the interlaced cultural-economic tyrannies
and personal duplicities of what one of them called the "Suburbia,
Materialism and Conformity… ‘Donna Reed/Leave it to Beaver' identity
held dear by a largely white, educated middle class." So archetypal was
the critique that primal-beat poet Alan Ginsberg sought out the place
on a Guggenheim-financed road trip in 1966, finding "radio aircraft
assembly frame ammunition petroleum nightclub Newspaper streets." He
plunged boldly "On to Wichita to Prophesy ! O frightful bard ! Into the
heart of the Vortex."

A Man Without Anecdotes

In that same year, as Ginsberg recited, one of the Vortex's most
commendable sons, destined to be perhaps its most influential, was
being recruited by the Central Intelligence Agency. Robert Michael
Gates was an example the Wichita Group would have found characteristic,
if not prophetican all-American boy in the all-American town.

He was born in the fall of 1943, during Wichita's wartime boom which
would prove nearly endless. His father sold wholesale auto parts, and
the family lived, like much of postwar America, in what he pointedly
would call "a middle class section" of town, presumably comfortable,
average circumstances (where "average," after all, was declared a civic
virtue). The uniformly generic accounts that have been written about
his life portray young Bob growing up with the full local infusion of
wholesomeness. "A model child," he was "bright, well-organized and
punctual…. read voraciously and loved to run and hike," but still found
time for church youth groups and "tutoring underprivileged children."

His early ambition to be a doctor offered a ready excuse for otherwise
suspect science projects, experiments on rats he kept in his basement
or the boiling of cat carcasses to examine their skeletons. (Alexander
Cockburn, one of his least forgiving critics, called him "a cat
torturer/drowner in his youth.") He even attended the same grade school
as future Republican Senator Arlen Specter (who, in Gates' 1991
confirmation hearing for CIA Director, vouched personally for the
exceptional quality of their elementary education). Gates went on to
excel at Wichita East, education-proud Kansas' largest high school.

He was also an Eagle Scout. More than just another rite of male
passage, it was for him credential, qualification, identitya talisman
of innocence and purityand he would cling to it. He often listed his
Distinguished Eagle Scout Award ahead of his CIA medals and, at 63,
earnestly served as president of the National Eagle Scout Association
even as he became secretary of defense.

After a quarter-century in government, participating in some of the
most crucial episodes of his era, Gates observed it all, yet in a sense
owned none of it, preferring to identify himself first and foremost
with the rank he won in 1950s Wichita. "That's how he started," said a
colleague, "and no matter what he's done or how things turned out,
that's how he wants to be seen." In the nation's future spymaster and
bureaucrat of the covert as oath-bound Eagle Scout, there was, of
course, Hardy Boys irony.

Beyond his merit badges, media profiles over the years offered
remarkably little of the flesh-and-blood man who served as a senior
official for three presidents. It was as if rigorous CIA checks had
already ruled out any of the unwieldy personal details. Gates' own
600-page memoir typically told almost nothing of his background.
"Friends remember him," Time
recounted in 1991, "as a child who demonstrated a need and a knack for
pleasing his elders." His Midwestern provenance left him
self-conscious, yet defiant, among the CIA's vestigial Eastern elite
and in a State Department he ridiculed as "guys with last names for
first names." He was, as he proudly pointed out, of "plain tastes and
middlebrow origins," so prairie practical and provincial that whenever
he saw someone carrying flowers, he asked in utter seriousness,
"Where's the funeral?"

In Washington as in Wichita, he was a familiar genus, reassuringly,
unthreateningly American. An interviewer in 1990 noticed an aphorism on
the wall of his White House office: "The easiest way to achieve
complete strategic surprise is to commit an act that makes no sense or
is even self-destructive." It was a reminder, Gates explained, of the enemy's
sinister ways. "A useful admonition when trying to understand the
Saddam Husseins of the world," the reporter noted brightly. It was
accepted, after all, that the U.S. faced alien forces of evil intent
and inherent duplicity in the sometimes menacing, unsavory business of
foreign policy. Men of homegrown virtue like Bob Gates had to fathom
the challenge and, whatever the transgression of traditional American
values, of the code of the Eagle Scout, more than match the methods.

In 1961, he went off to William and Mary, the venerable college in
Williamsburg, Virginia, where Presidents Thomas Jefferson and James
Monroe had been educated two centuries before, but which had since
slipped into parochial obscurity. Shuttered for the Civil War when
faculty and students left en masse to fight for the Confederacy,
state-supported William and Mary admitted its first African-American
only in 1963, nearly a decade after the University of Virginia and
other regional white redoubts. "Oh my goodness, very traditional, very
conservative, and very, very southern," remembered a woman who studied
there in the 1960s and still works at the school. "During Vietnam I
think we had some of the only campus demonstrations in the country that
were pro-war."

It was not a usual Wichita college choice, but Dan Landis, an Eagle
Scout at Wichita East who had gone there two years earlier, ardently
recruited Gates, and he was given a generous scholarship. On arrival,
he was ushered into the Alpha Phi Omega service fraternity, while
Landis set him up driving a school bus part-time for pocket money. He
also enlisted Gates as an adviser to a local scout troop and got him to
join his church. The two Kansans settled into what other students saw
as a "straight-arrow, no-nonsense" routine.

Asked recently what the future CIA director and defense secretary did
for extracurricular activities in the eventful 1960s, Landis, a retired
educator, replied simply, "We did scouts and we went to church."
Actually, Gates was also a dorm advisor and business manager for a
campus literary and arts magazine and, while already-discreet Bob never
revealed his politics to Landis, he was also active in the Young
Republicans.

The "scholar scout," as a college newspaper called him in 2007, began
in pre-med but soon switched to European History. Timothy Sullivan, who
sat in courses with him and went on to be president of the college,
thought Gates "immensely disciplined, really smart and obviously very
ambitious." Like most witnesses along the way, Sullivan could remember
no "sparkling anecdotes" about the famous man, but assumed the
qualities behind his later success must have been "in some form or
other evident" at the time. They were all, he did remember,
"undergraduates who didn't know much about the world and certainly
nothing about the world in which we were going to wind up."

At commencement in 1965, the service fraternity, scout troop, school
bus, church, and campus work all won him the college's award as the
senior making "the greatest contribution to his fellow man" (another
accolade faithfully retained in his résumé). He was interested now in
Eastern Europe, the Soviet Bloc, perhaps in teaching, though later he
would say that the assassination of John F. Kennedy in his junior year
moved him to think as well of public service.

He would take a fellowship for a master's in history at Indiana
University, a well-funded Soviet and East European Affairs center known
for training future government officials and academics in the Cold
War's most valued specialization. "A real patriot in the very best
sense of the word," was the way Landis summed up his Kansas friend. It
was one thing the Vortex and Wichita Group might have agreed on.

The Baltic Syndrome

Our story's other train was more exotic, a muscular new Red Putilov
engine emblazoned with the hammer and sickle and pulling an ornate,
plush wagon-lit
with scars still raw where the imperial double-headed eagle of the
Romanoff Tsars had been chiseled off. The year was 1933. Rolling
eastward across the Russian plain, the swaying car carried the first
U.S. diplomats dispatched to Moscow as President Franklin Roosevelt
recognized the Soviet Union after some 15 years of severed relations
following the Bolshevik Revolution.

Aboard was a 29 year-old foreign service officer, later to become
famous as a diplomat and scholar, George Kennan. Though he was already
deemed a government expert on Russia, the train provided Kennan's first
actual exposure to the Soviet Union. As he listened to their escort,
Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov, reminisce in London-fluent English
about growing up in a village by the rail line, about books he read as
a boy and his dreams of becoming a librarian, the Princeton-educated
diplomat from Milwaukee was astonished. "We suddenly realized, or at
least I did, that these people we were dealing with were human beings
like ourselves." Kennan noted, as if making a scientific discovery,
"that they had been born somewhere, that they had their childhood
ambitions as we had." It would prove but a fleeting moment of respite
in an endless ordeal of mutual ignorance, dogmatism, and dread.

In his surprise, Kennan symbolized generations of U.S. officials who
would continue to see the Soviet Union through the prism not only of
native provincialism and ideological hostility, but also the pervasive
bias of their training. Pre-world-power America, in its isolation, knew
little of the old Russia and even less of the tumultuous, often savage
new politics of class and revolutionary party power that followed the
Bolsheviks' coup of November 1917. "A fearsome set of internationalists
and logicians," Winston Churchill had called the new Soviet leaders
with Tory wrath, "a sub-human structure upon the ruins of Christian
civilization." While a million Americans now voted socialist and there
was some early sympathy for the "Reds," most of the U.S. from Wall
Street to Main Street shared Churchill's reflexive fear and loathing,
if not his florid elocution.

Anti-capitalist Soviet Russia was not merely a disagreeable state on
some far horizon, but an immediate threat to domestic tranquility.
Alarm gripped even the most respectable of newspapers, in which the
Bolsheviks, like early Christians in Rome or Jews in Medieval Europe,
were reliably reported to be eating babies and committing other
unspeakable outrages. "BRUTALITIES OF THE BOLSHEVIKI," announced a
typical 1919 headline in the usually sedate New York Times, "STRIP WOMEN IN STREETSPEOPLE OF EVERY CLASS EXCEPT THE SCUM SUBJECTED TO VIOLENCE BY MOBS."

In the late summer of 1918, U.S. troops landed in north Russia and in
Siberia, part of a joint military intervention with the French,
British, and Japanese to aid the monarchists and turn the tide against
the Bolsheviks in the Russian civil war; meanwhile, across America, an
accompanying Great Red Scare loosed mass arrests, persecutions, and
deportations of foreign radicals of every stripe. It was "a moment of
political repression," wrote noted historian Howard Zinn, "unparalleled
in United States history." In a sweeping onslaught of reaction,
all-American Wichita would, by 1919, imprison and try hundreds of its
citizens, assumed seditious, if not terrorist, simply for having
joined, or worked for, a union.

Over the next two decades of mortgaged peace, Washington and other
Western powers would abide tyrannies around the worldNazi Germany,
Fascist Italy, and Fascist Spain, as well as despots from China to
Argentina. Yet the Soviet Union was in another category, "untenable,
unacceptable, unimaginable," as one writer put it. In geopolitics and
language, the new revolutionary state was to be treated as an infected
patient, held in isolation behind a cordon sanitaire (as Kennan would himself so famously urge after World War II in his celebrated, if unoriginal, policy of "containment").

With Washington refusing even to recognize the Soviet regime throughout
the 1920s, no posting or direct exposure to Russia was possible for the
officials charged with keeping watch on the scourge. The fall-back
position was academic training in the nature of the new regime; and,
since expertise was lacking in American colleges, Washington sent its
Kennans to study Soviet affairs at European universities. The "experts"
they found there, however, were almost exclusively exiles from Tsarist
Russia, expatriates by class, outlook, and personal history, loathing —
but also largely ignorant of — Soviet rule, and often financially as
well as sentimentally nostalgic for the fallen autocracy.

Few of history's losers owed defeat more to political blindness or were
more blinded by defeat; and no victims remained more staunchly
oblivious to what had befallen them than the Russian émigré exodus.
Knowing Russia so little to begin with, Washington's representatives
proved incapable of seeing just how distorted were the perspectives of
their mentors, whose reflexive animus, after all, America's top
officials shared without the encumbrance of knowledge. Lost from the
start were intellectual integrity and independent judgment, those most
basic necessities for any diplomatic or intelligence service and, of
course, for formulating national policy.

From that corrupted tutelage, freshly minted U.S. specialists were
commonly assigned to Latvia or Estonia, small Baltic states conquered
by Russia in the eighteenth century but now (briefly) independent.
These became Meccas for the anti-Soviet Diaspora, in many respects
small replicas of the caste system and reactionary politics of Imperial
Russia itself. So it was that America's diplomats, expected to
understand and interpret the Soviet Union for vast stakes, were shaped
not only by an insular and fearful American culture, but also by the
pervasive lost-world bias of their trainers. Not surprisingly, a Baltic
Syndrome ripened and settled into career orthodoxy. Without having set
foot there, America's early "experts" on the USSR, men who would shape
policy in the Cold War, formed indelible attitudes "while studying
Russia from afar."

Kennan's epiphany on the train proved short-lived. The Soviets soon
plunged into the nightmare world of dictator Joseph Stalin's Great
Purges. Facing the accompanying craze of xenophobia and suspicion, U.S.
diplomats reacted predictably. The outwardly charming, patrician
ambassador from Philadelphia, William Bullitt, Jr., regretted in
dispatches the influence in the Kremlin of a "wretched little kike" –
whom he discreetly did not identify by name — as opposed to what he
called "straight" Russians (whom he tolerated only slightly more).
Fluent in Russian, but in the disappeared Russia of their émigré
tutors, Kennan and his colleagues understood little of the rulers and
ruled in a society so separated from them by class and perspective.
"Weird developments" was the way one of them characterized the
murderous midnight arrests and show trials that ravaged the USSR in the
1930s, seemingly inscrutable events rooted in defining struggles
between crushing backwardness and revolutionary fervor, democracy and
dictatorship, confident openness and fearful isolation.

The embassy found even more baffling an undeniable popular support for
the tyranny that had so savagely extinguished the great Enlightenment
and Western social democratic ideals of the Revolution. Behind the
Communist Party despotism lay a chilling authenticity in the
"dictatorship of the proletariat," which had carried upward a new
stratum of privilege and power. Kennan would not bother with the
"hackneyed question of how far Bolshevism has changed Russia" — so he
began a 1938 State Department lecture. Missing much of the point of the
past 20 years and the 50 to come, he stressed what he considered the
historical essence of a people: Russia's congenital "Asiatic"
aggressiveness and penchant for "Byzantine" intrigue. "After all," he
explained with no audible irony or hint of self-awareness, "nations,
like individuals, are largely the products of their environment..."

For its part, Washington had no official doubts about the evil paradox
of the Soviets, a system seen as mad and inept, yet diabolical and
relentless, its policies cruelly capricious yet cunningly planned. "We
were all agreed," as one of Kennan's superiors put it archly, "what was
the situation in the USSR."

Cartoon Worlds, Russian and American

Through the inter-war years, and especially after World War II, the
specialists, invariably in agreement, advised a coterie of senior
officials whose own consensus was historic. Their names made up a roll
call of men who shaped postwar U.S. policy and much of the world in the
second, American half of the twentieth century — Secretary of State
Dean Acheson, Secretary of Defense and Undersecretary of State Robert
Lovett, Ambassador Averill Harriman, Assistant Secretary of Defense and
World Bank President John McCloy, Secretary of Defense James Forrestal,
State Department aide Paul Nitze, and a handful of others. With much
inbreeding of schools, firms, and society, theirs was a universe of
Groton, polo, and tennis, of Wall Street combines, rich wives, shaded
estates, "wealth, cleverness, and social grace," as Evan Thomas and
Walter Isaacson described it — and of congenial precepts about world
affairs, including ready agreement about Russia. It was, above all, a
circle of fateful insularity.

Assumed to be of broad experience, they were men who had never
experienced the Depression torment of their era, as so many of their
countrymen had, to say nothing of the upheavals of war and revolution
that convulsed so much of the early twentieth-century world. Apparently
cultured, they had cultivated no sensibility for societies beyond those
of Western Europe. Typically, the lean, magnetic young financier Bob
Lovett played the mimic for his Long Island weekend circle, with
rubber-faced, reportedly hilariously accented parodies of the world's
laughable people — Russians, Arabs, and Chinese among others.

In its lurid propaganda of the period, the Soviet tyranny barraged its
own predominantly peasant, still largely pre-modern populace with
cartoons of vulture-like figures labeled Wall Street bankers and
corporate lawyers, all visibly anti-Slavic bigots of reactionary venom.
Like the matching portraits of bomb-throwing Bolsheviks in American
cartoons, the images exploited the primal. Yet, in ways long
unrecognized in the U.S., the men who governed Washington's relations
with the world lent much flesh-and-blood credence to the crude
caricatures on the walls of Soviet factories and collective farms.

What America's analysts and policy-makers lost in their stunted
worldview was the sheer complexity, contradiction, and paradox of the
Soviet Union, all relevant to informed policy. Missing between myopia
and phobia was the authentic alternative to the Baltic Syndrome's
policy by caricature: an intellectual openness and seriousness, honesty
and sensibility, that might have led to genuine insight, to actual
"intelligence" that could have saved lives and fortunes, even moderated
the Kremlin tyranny and hastened its end.

As a post-Soviet flood of archives has revealed (though it was no
secret even during the years of Soviet rule), Moscow's foreign policy
was waged more often in caution than aggressiveness, more out of
weakness than strength, and with an abiding parochial fear and
ignorance of the U.S., a hostility that Washington's acts in kind only
reinforced, justified, and prolonged. So much of the great "superpower"
rivalry was what John Le Carré would aptly call a grotesque
"looking-glass war."

The Soviet leaders had been seared by revolution, intervention, purges,
the West's cynical efforts to push Hitler east in the 1930s, and the
near-defeat and utter destruction of World War II, followed by U.S.
postwar dominance and encirclement in which they found themselves an
eternal half-hour from nuclear annihilation ("I'll climb the Eiffel
Tower and spit on all of Europe," the provincial Leonid Brezhnev, a
future Kremlin leader, had said defiantly but pitifully in 1945.) The
postwar Soviet leadership were creatures of their preconceptions and
preoccupations, and of their odious politics, as much as any ruling
class in history. Yet to relegate them to caricature, to ignore the
touchstones of their lives, was ultimate folly. What American
specialists saw were not fearful, compromised "human beings like
ourselves," but monstrous, implacable, mythically evil enemies in
ill-fitting suits, to be opposed at all costs, with the end — the
"defeat" of Russia one way or another — justifying the means.

The stakes were incalculable. The Cold War would fatally mortgage
domestic and foreign affairs in the world's two most powerful
countries, enthroning corrupt oligarchs in each who mocked the ideals —
political democracy in the case of the U.S., economic in the case of
Russia — for which so many had died. Their "superpower" clash would
dominate world politics for more than four decades. It would draft tens
of millions, devour fortunes, cordon Europe and Asia off into armed
camps, entangle neutrals, wantonly destroy any potential
political-economic alternatives to either corrupt system, rouse bitter
political struggles on every continent, unleash proxy wars with untold
millions of casualties, periodically threaten nuclear holocaust, and
fix the fate of nations from Chile to Cambodia, the Congo to
Afghanistan. When it ended in 1991 with the seeming victory of the
United States, the outcome recast the planet. It had been the rivalry
of the century, and it threw a still unrecognized curse over the next.
No wonder that new period, rather than being given a name of its own,
would be known, like some sad afterword, as "the post-Cold War era."

From 1933 to 1945, there was one notable exception to the astigmatism
of the specialists and their superiors — the President of the United
States. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, that Hudson River squire, harbored
no illusions about the Bolsheviks. At the outset of his presidency, he
made clear his disgust with what he called "the hunger, death, and
bitterness" of Soviet rule. Yet he believed that the Kremlin's foreign
policy would be shaped by the acts of other powers and he took a
broader view of Russia's painful experiment as well as its profound
weakness. "He had some curiosity about the Soviet Union, a measured
respect for its accomplishments," judged his biographer James MacGregor
Burns, "and a certain sympathy for its goals of social justice,
although he doubted that one could obtain 'Utopia in a day.'"

For a dozen years, FDR held at bay the cultivated repugnance of his
diplomats and the incestuous bigotry of his plutocratic senior
officials. "Frankly, if I were a Russian, I would feel that I had been
given the run-around in the United States," he said of a bottleneck in
World War II aid to Russia. "If I were a Russian…" — it was not a
premise common in government cables, intelligence briefings, or policy
papers, then or later; nor did such essential human empathy necessarily
mean some policy simplistically favorable to the Soviets.

In 1944, for instance, Roosevelt was seized with a typical enthusiasm
for a postwar plan to reform the ancient feudal land of Iran, to free
the country and the Persian Gulf of its historic predators, Russia as
well as Britain. The policy would enrage London and Moscow, FDR was
told; he nonetheless pressed on. Defying the old empires, communist or
capitalist — that was to be "an example of what we could do," he told
an aide, "by an unselfish American policy."

It was all over in April 1945 with his death. Into the Oval Office
moved the more typical American certainty of Harry Truman, a feisty,
remorselessly compromised machine politician who would be led in the
White House by bellicose, half-informed aides and who gleaned what
little he knew of the outside world from a "story book view of
history," as his biographer Richard Miller once put it, read with "a
rousing Fourth of July patriotism" in rural western Missouri — not so
far up the tracks from the Vortex.

Targeting Russia

Like Wichita's B-52s and Titan missiles, the CIA was targeted on
Russia. As World War II had been for its predecessor, the Office of
Strategic Services (OSS), the Cold War was for the CIA. It defined
every purpose, and all else incidental. More than 80% of the Agency's
ever fattening budget in its early years was locked in the ice floe of
the Baltic Syndrome. The CIA was not to be confused with — or disposed
to confuse the President and his top officials with — genuine
intelligence about countries of the world in and for themselves. The
Middle East, Asia, Latin America, Africa — a region mattered, for the
most part, only as it related to the struggle with the Soviet Union.
From the Vietnam War to Afghanistan and Iraq — with scores of
lesser-known disasters in between — that willful negligence was, and
remains, immensely damaging.

As it happened, though few American experts seemed to realize it, the
target had already been demolished as the Cold War began, a condition
from which it never really recovered. If blinkered U.S. specialists
missed much of Soviet political or social reality, they could not help
seeing the country's sheer physical ruin. Revolution, terror, civil
war, purges, collectivization, famine, the horrors of the Gulag, World
War II's carnage, still more postwar starvation — the three-decade toll
by various reckonings was in the range of 30-50 million dead and
countless maimed, an inconceivable demography of national desolation.

Whatever the number, the visible result was a USSR in what one of its
historians called, with rare candor, "a state of abject poverty." The
1946-47 Ukrainian famine, like the Nazi siege of Leningrad, made
gruesome reality of old American news claims of cannibalism. Nikita
Khrushchev, the former shepherd and miner, who rose to lead (and
reform) the post-Stalin USSR, recounted in horror and shame a scene he
had seen himself in postwar Odessa: "The woman had the corpse of her
own child on the table, and was cutting it up."

In 1945, welcoming General Dwight Eisenhower to Moscow after their
joint victory over the Nazis, Soviet Marshal Georgi Zhukov told his
fellow commander that the Soviet plight was even worse than that of the
defeated, destroyed Axis powers. "Russia would never place itself in
the position of begging," Eisenhower recorded, noting the plea embedded
in Zhukov's description, "but.... he could tell me with the utmost
frankness that the standard of living in Russia today was deplorably
low, and that it was his conviction that even the present standard in
Germany was at least as high as it is in Russia..."

Touring the USSR two years later, British Field Marshal Bernard
Montgomery saw the same far-reaching ruin. "The Soviet Union is very,
very tired," he wrote Eisenhower. "Devastation in Russia is appalling
and the country is in no fit state to go to war.... It will be 15 to 20
years before Russia will be able to remedy her various defects and be
in a position to fight a major world war with a good chance of
success."

Nowhere was evidence plainer than in the creaking Soviet military. By
1948, demobilization had reduced the Red Army in Europe from more than
eleven million to less than three million. Combat-ready troops matched
Western armies numerically, but lacked the equivalent nuclear weapons
or strategic air power — and those were just the most obvious deficits.
The Red Army remained shoddily equipped, subject to high rates of
desertion and deplorable morale. As late as 1950, half its transport
was unmechanized, moving on still badly war-torn roads, with 80% of
railway bridges still seriously damaged. Troops were consumed with the
occupation of vast new Soviet-controlled territories in Eastern Europe
from the Baltic to the Balkans, with quelling resistance and supporting
the rule of local communists, and, above all, with extracting
reparations and rebuilding the demolished USSR. "In the late 1940s, the
Red Juggernaut," concluded a post-mortem by a team of scholars years
later, "was anything but."

Of condoms and "endings in silence"

Formed in 1947, the CIA proved up to the task of justifying its mission
— despite the enemy's utter exhaustion and preoccupation. By what
historian Franklyn Holzman called "politics and guesswork" (what our
own era termed "fixing intelligence around the policy"), the Agency
launched a long tradition, which Robert Gates would inherit and carry
forward two decades later, of the systematic exaggeration of Russian
power. To the horse-drawn Soviet occupation army in Eastern Europe,
analysts added phantom divisions, magically restored demobilized
troops, and then topped the fictional mix with hair-raising scenarios
of a possible invasion of Western Europe. They "exaggerated Soviet
capabilities and intentions to such a great extent," as Holzman's study
documented 20 later, "that it is surprising anyone took them
seriously."

As would be true over the next four decades, the media turned out to
have not the slightest difficulty parroting the fabrication. Typically,
under the headline, "Russia's Edge in Men and Arms" — and this was just
as the Red Army reached its nadir — an April 1948 US News
announced: "Russia, at this stage, is the world's no. 1 military power
[whose] armies and air forces are in a position to pour across Europe
and into Asia almost at will."

By now a senior official awash in contrived, ever more ominous
intelligence, it was Kennan who completed the CIA's initial portfolio
with a 1948 proposal to conduct covert subversion, sabotage, and — in a
term of suitable ambiguity — "political action" inside Russia, the
Soviet Bloc as a whole, or any other country where the rivals might
compete. For the old threat that knew no bounds, foreign or domestic,
it was to be containment uncontained. The task was not exactly new for
American governments long engaged in freebooting regime-change in Latin
America. But the writ for intervention now spread into what, for
ever-provincial Washington, were essentially uncharted regions of the
world.

Begun under the control of the State Department, covert action was
swiftly taken over by an increasingly bureaucratically adept,
politically potent CIA. Kennan himself soon had qualms. "I would be
extremely careful of doing anything at the governmental end that
purports to affect directly the governmental system of another country,
no matter what the provocation may seem," he said in a speech as he
left government in 1953. "It is replete with possibilities for
misunderstanding and bitterness. To the extent it might be successful
it would involve the U.S. in heavy responsibilities." The warning would
echo down half-a-century of grim history to Kabul 2001 and Baghdad
2003. But Kennan (whose view policy-makers were glad to accept so long
as it agreed with their own) was by then an outsider, like many
ex-officials he had already become a prophet without honor in the
increasingly close-minded councils of Washington policy-making.

The new mandate for intervention would lie with the innocuously titled
"Office of Policy Coordination." After initial fumbling by men far too
hesitant, it was handed over to Frank Wisner, a well-to-do southerner
and fey Russophobe in the Lovett mold. He came to Washington in his
bald, jowly forties by way of a Wall Street law firm, a wartime OSS
liaison with Romanian royalty, and the requisite Manhattan and
Georgetown society friends from whom he recruited the "old boys" who
would give the early CIA much of its outer gloss and inner fatuousness.
Somerset Maugham, Graham Greene, later Le Carré and others — a teeming
genre — would portray the smug ignorance, incompetence, sleaze and
self-ruin of spies' machinations. But the Wisner club's all-too-real
version of life imitated, and improved on, art.

Funded by money skimmed from the Marshall Plan, their "operations" were
grim previews — and parodies — of things to come, of a world that less
than two decades later would be second nature to Robert Gates. The code
names were colorful; the realities dark. BLOODSTONE enlisted Nazi SS
veterans, most of them war criminals, and placed them in key positions
— from the founders of West German intelligence to CIA-paid advisers to
tyrannical client regimes in Iraq, Egypt, Syria, or Saudi Arabia, where
they proved adept at organizing secret police and using Gestapo torture
methods to deal with domestic democrats and Islamic devouts (wiping out
the former while scarring and steeling the latter for a fierce
evolution to our jihadist world). MOCKINGBIRD employed Washington Post
editor Phil Graham and other ready establishment collaborators to
suborn the foreign press and American media. "By the early 1950s,"
wrote biographer Deborah Davis, "Wisner 'owned' respected members of
the New York Times, Newsweek, CBS and other communications vehicles."

Meanwhile, the denizens of "Policy Coordination" set off stink bombs at
suspect youth rallies around the world, launched balloons with millions
of propaganda leaflets over Soviet satellites as well as the USSR, and
sent flocks of agents into Eastern Europe, Russia, and Central Asia to
sabotage and foment uprisings, which were confidently expected
momentarily. To attack enemy morale, always presumed to be frail, they
schemed to parachute in as well hugely outsized condoms labeled
"American medium." Whatever the condom effect, the fate of most agents
was clear. Betrayed by sheer ineptitude, Soviet moles, or both — Wisner
was a convivial friend of the legendary Soviet agent Kim Philby and
other Kremlin spies high in Western intelligence — operatives plunged
into the Iron Curtain night somewhere south of Rostock or across the
Amu Darya at new moon only to appear later as tortured wraiths in some
show trial dock or simply to vanish without trace. "Endings in
silence," a former control officer called it.

Pyrrhic Victory

The results of CIA covert actions were far more bracing in non-European
societies not controlled by the Soviets, where black bags of cash or
small mercenary military forces sufficed to seize power. Hence, the ten
months from August 1953 to June 1954 that shook Wisner's world with
self-congratulation — and American foreign policy with fateful
precedents.

In August 1953, in an Iran in which FDR had hoped to apply "an
unselfish American policy," the CIA's TP-AJAX (Operation Ajax) bought
South Tehran street toughs and assorted notables in order to overthrow
the popular, elected government of Mohammed Mossadegh, staving off oil
nationalization, securing Persia's petroleum for the five U.S. major
oil companies as well as the old British oil overlords, and returning
to the throne as Shah of Shahs (after an ignominious flight from
Tehran) the dim, grandiose, but obligingly despotic Mohammed Reza
Pahlevi.

The next June, in Guatemala, the CIA launched PB-SUCCESS, dragging a
drunken right-wing colonel through a cold shower before installing him,
temporarily sober, as caudillo
to replace another popular, potentially populist regime worrying to
U.S. business interests. Each of these operations was based on the
flimsy, thoroughly unexamined pretext that the country was in imminent
danger of a left-wing — ipso facto Russian — takeover; both
would be followed by medals proudly pinned on in private White House
ceremonies; both would involve fraud and folly not exposed for decades;
and both would have mortal consequences in the affected countries and,
in the case of Iran, for twenty-first-century America and much of the
Middle East as well.

The Tehran bagman for the CIA was Kermit Roosevelt, Jr., Theodore's
grandson. The Agency's other men for the Middle East were less
patrician but similarly unqualified: Miles Copeland, Jr., a jazz
trumpeter from Alabama with a few college hours in music at Tuscaloosa
and no substantive knowledge of the Arab world; James Critchfield,
educated at North Dakota Agricultural College in the late 1930s, then a
military prison commandant in occupied Germany who befriended one of
those useful Nazis; and James Jesus Angleton of Boise, who had followed
a mediocre (if racy) career at Yale with OSS intrigues in Italy (in
which he made good use of prewar family ties to the Mafia). The
later-notorious Angleton was an extreme case, but not an atypical one.
He combined a whiskey-drenched anti-Soviet mania (which would, in the
1970s and 80s, develop into genuine paranoia) with some bureaucratic
agility, but no palpable expertise in Middle Eastern affairs — all of
which, of course, fitted him perfectly to direct the CIA's intimate
ties with the Israeli intelligence service, the Mossad.

"They somehow inherited British attitudes towards the colored races of
the world," reporter Thomas Powers, a chronicler of the CIA, wrote
gingerly. Somehow. The trumpeter, Ag school graduate, manic drunk, and the oblivious, expedient men above and below them simply knew no better.

The legacies of all this would be epic. The brutal military and
corporate-mafia repression installed in Guatemala foreshadowed Chile
after the 1973 U.S.-backed coup and murder of socialist president
Salvador Allende by General Augusto Pinochet, as it would Central
America's death-squad agonies in the Reagan 1980s. Even quieter
victories by CIA-cosseted regimes in the Philippines and the Congo
would soon lead to plundering, bloody dictatorships.

Nowhere, however, was the toll of covert intervention higher than in the Middle East and South Asia:

In Iraq, a CIA-supported corrupt monarchy, inherited from the British,
stifled democratic stirrings in the 1950s; then, CIA-instigated Ba'ath
Party coups in 1963, and again in 1968, killed reformers and reforms
(along with any hopes of sectarian equity), and led to Saddam Hussein's
tribal-clan despotism.

In Iran, the Shah's CIA-allied and -tutored torture regime centering on
his SAVAK secret police destroyed any real possibility of a democratic
counterforce to the Ayatollah's ensuing clerical tyranny bred by the
Shah's blundering, martyring repression.

In Syria, CIA-bankrolled, opéra bouffe juntas dating to the 1950s begat the dictatorship of Hafez al-Assad.

In Lebanon, CIA collusion with Israel helped prop up the privileged
rule of the Maronite Christian minority from the late 1940s through the
civil-war torn 1970s and 80s, while the hostility of the long-oppressed
Shia majority eventually led to Hizbullah.

In Afghanistan and Pakistan, from the 1950s on, incessant CIA Cold War
machinations in the Hindu Kush, and patronage of Pakistani military
dictatorships, would set the stage for the calamities of the Afghan
anti-Soviet War, the civil war that followed, the rise of the Taliban
with its safe haven for al-Qaeda, and so of our post-9/11 world of
terror and war.

Even in the obscure Horn of Africa, there were CIA payoffs to Somali
politicians and warlords in the 1960s — $20,000-a-year was the going
rate for prime ministers. The bribes went alongside generous backing
for the venal, autocratic regime of Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie
across the border. (This was ransom for a U.S. electronic spy station
in Ethiopian-occupied Eritrea.) CIA-chauffeured Suburbans whisked His
Imperial Majesty to and from the recreational hangings of democracy or
ethnic-rights dissidents in the expansive central square of his
capital, Addis Ababa — all of which only sped the region's long descent
into apocalyptic famine and war.

No flashpoint of the early twenty-first-century from the Mediterranean
to the Java Sea would be without a half-century-plus legacy of covert
Washington interventions. These were instrumental in birthing, or
maintaining, tyrannical regimes that almost invariably bred, in
opposition, an anti-U.S. atavism, while ruthlessly extinguishing
democratic alternatives. The United States and its prime intelligence
agency did not, of course, single-handedly create the incendiary world
of 9/11. But Washington wantonly fostered so much that was contrary
even to the most cold-eyed version of its own self-interest that what
Robert Gates termed the "splendid" American triumph over the USSR in
the Cold War would also prove one of the great Pyrrhic victories in the
annals of world politics.

Historians arguing over that half-century of covert actions tended to
discover a "rogue" CIA trampling American ideals or else a
much-maligned agency only "following orders." In the twisting internal
politics of Washington, it was largely a distinction without meaning.

Deniability-minded postwar presidents were surely prone to Henry II's
demure order — "Who will rid me of this meddlesome priest?" — to his
zealous knights to hack to death Archbishop Thomas Beckett in the
sanctity of the cathedral. But to the Oval Office, as Henry's court,
evidence of meddling came up the chain of command, with willing knights
always in waiting. No regime or ruler "changed" by Washington since
1947 fell solely because of presidential animus.

Death sentences on men and regimes — with multitudes regularly
destroyed in the ensuing maelstroms — were pronounced by key
presidential advisors or came in the form of institutional verdicts
from the collective wisdom of the CIA, National Security Council,
Pentagon, State Department, or some combination of all four.
Presidential orders were usually prompted, or recommended, by
successive small inter-agency groups made up of senior men and
discreetly labeled with the number of a birthing presidential directive
or some other suitably bloodless bureaucratic designation — 303, Forty,
the Special Coordination Committee.

Not that the CIA was not manipulative, did not harbor an occupational
contempt for the awkward hindrance of democratic politics at home (or
abroad), was not driven by organizational as well as personal demons,
or played by virtuoso exiles or alien spy agencies pursuing their own
ends. America's orgy of intervention traced to all those influences, as
well as to the National Security Advisor, that assassination- and
coup-whisperer to amenable bosses and bureaucracies. From Kennedy's
McGeorge Bundy to Lyndon Johnson's Walt Rostow, Richard Nixon's Henry
Kissinger, and Jimmy Carter's Zbigniew Brzezinski, as well as lesser
figures under Ronald Reagan and his successors, some of the most ardent
initiators of covert murder and mayhem were those NSC gatekeepers and
counselors supposedly there to restrain presidents and regimes from
such primitive and ultimately counterproductive impulses.

For Frank Wisner, all the covert glory began to fade in the historic
fall of 1956. Flouting a more cautious, but typically unenforced
Eisenhower policy of restraint toward Eastern Europe, his Operation RED
SOX/RED CAP during the Hungarian revolt against Soviet puppet rule (and
the coincidental Suez crisis in which Britain, France and Israel
invaded Abdel Nasser's Egypt after he nationalized the Suez Canal, all
to the CIA's surprise) was a classic of its kind. Broadcasts inciting
the Hungarians to rise up, an émigré army manqué, and the usual
balloons fatally linked the rebels to the U.S., hardening Moscow all
the more in its decision to crush the uprising as a
"counter-revolution" and an act of Cold War rollback — both of which
Wisner, if not Washington, fully intended.

Watching from his mission on the Danube was a 42-year-old Russian
ambassador, future KGB chief, and eventual Kremlin leader, Yuri
Andropov, who would take it all in — and eventually into the Politburo,
where, 23 years later, his too-often-borne-out fear of American
machinations would trigger Russia's catastrophic invasion of
Afghanistan, the seminal event of our post-9/11 nightmare.

Wisner soon sank into dementia, a condition he shared with a telling
number of others in early Cold War high-society, including the Washington Post's
Graham, Secretary of Defense Forrestal (who threw himself out of the
window of the hospital where he was committed), and, not least,
Angleton, who turned his madness in a burst of rampant destruction on
his own agency as well as the rest of the government in a crazed search
for a Soviet "super mole." Wisner was eased from the CIA in 1958, his
files reviewed and promptly burned as the "ramblings of a madman."
There would be discreet clinics and quiet treatment for mania, if
little care for the larger pathology he and his fellow psychotics
embodied.

Late in October 1965, as Bob Gates began graduate school at Indiana,
Wisner drove to his Maryland Eastern Shore retreat, and blew off his
head with a shotgun. Crowding the National Cathedral, Washington's
elite and CIA colleagues — special Agency guards kept the KGB from a
close look — sang the hymn of Christian martyrdom "Fling Out the
Banner" before a hero's burial at Arlington. "Instead of a dirge," one
of the old boys remembered, "it was exuberant, powerful, exultant."
Conscious mourning, as conscious foreign policy, was still far away.

Roger Morris is an award-winning author and
investigative journalist who served in the Foreign Service and on the
Senior Staff of the National Security Council under Presidents Lyndon
Johnson and Richard Nixon. Before resigning over the invasion of
Cambodia, he was one of only three officials comprising Henry
Kissinger's Special Projects Staff conducting the initial highly secret
"back-channel" negotiations with Hanoi to end the Vietnam War in
1969-1970. He is the author of several critically acclaimed books,
including Richard Milhous Nixon: The Rise of an American Politician, 1913-1952, and the best-selling Partners in Power: The Clintons and Their America as well as, most recently, The Money and the Power: The Making of Las Vegas and Its Hold on America
(co-authored with historian Sally Denton). His Shadows of the Eagle, a
history of U.S. covert intervention in the Middle East and South Asia
since the 1940s, will be published by Knopf early in 2008. His studies
and commentary on American politics and foreign policy appear regularly
on the website of the Green Institute where he is Senior Fellow.